Death on Two Legs // Shyan

11. Grim Reaper

11 years earlier,
2007

Shane Madej was 21 years old, he looked like the most stereotypical nerd from an early 2000s high school comedy flick.
Nothing made him too special, he was taller than most, funny, kinda cute, he cut his own hair.
And he killed people to pay off his student loans.

How he got into that was not important- well, it was complicated.
He just did some digging on the internet one time, found himself on a shady site, emailed some people, made connections. His intentions weren't to become an assassin at first, hell no. He just tought that there were easy ways in the word to make a quick buck. He tought of making drug deliveries at first. It was fine, he never used the product on himself or got caught with bags of coke under the backseat of his car. He actually had a huge fear related to heroin, so it was easy for him to keep his hands off. He was charming and nice, it was esy for him to build up a reputation among the lowlife. After a few months of working as a drug uber, there was a weird email in his 'buisness' inbox.

"Seeking for a helping hand. Email back to this address if interested in clean up work.
5000$/hit

J.G.F"

Shane assumed that the so called clean up work would be mostly drug related, well, he was naive and young.
He didn't even need to consider emailing back, of course he did for that amount of money. What he got back was an address;
Pennhurst State School and Hospital
1205 Commonwealth Dr, Spring City
He would stay for two months.

The flight to Pennsylvania was only a two hours nuisance. He was supposedly flying there to meet some friends.
This 'friend' of his was in reality the most dangerous man he'd ever come in contact with, doctor Jesse Fear. A rich and powerful man with a very unique buisness. Human trafficing.

They agreed on meeting in his office after visiting time.
Shane was nervous. This was the biggest job offer he had ever had, honest work or not. Nobody paid this much anywhere, and he wasn't going to fuck this up.
The hallways alone felt pressing, his anxiety was feeding off of the peeling, old wallpapers in the long hallways. He met barely anyone on his way to the Mayflower Hall.

A white haired man sat in a leather chair in a third story office.
His voice was dry and cold.
The meeting would be a bit of a blur to Shane afterwards; he had been honestly a little too scared of the words that came out of the old man's mouth to remember them afterwards.
It wasn't drug work, no.
It was killing people he went there to do, unconsicously of course, but at that point he couldn't really decline. Doing that would probably get Shane killed instead, as he now knew about the more twisted side of Pennhurst State Hospital. The beating, the killing and the selling. He felt like Satan himself had just employed him, and as he recieved the case with his brand new gun in it with shaking hands, his mind compared it to a grim reaper recieving his first ever scythe.
The darkness was beginning to swallow him then, and it would continue to eat him alive for the rest of his life if he wouldn't embrace it.
So he took the job.

His first victims were a man and a woman. The first time he shot anyone. The first time he took a life.
He knew where they were and when, the perks of his boss being one of the highest up doctors in the hospital. He was hiding in plain sight as a "medical student".
The targets were a nurse and a doctor who had witnessed something go down, something that would easily get Fear locked up for the rest of his life. Shane never knew what it was, he just followed orders.
He shot the man in the head before he even noticed Shane was there in the room with them. His name was Jeff, he only learned that because of what the woman cried out as her last words as she watched the man fall, brains and blood splattering on the walls with the force of thunder and lightning;
"Please... Jeff..."
Her name was Bri. She hadn't been older than twenty five, brunette hair and dark eyes that continued to haunt Shane's nightmares for years after he pulled the trigger. Those terrified eyes, too scared to even produce tears.
He never learned the names of his victims after that.
A murder-suicide, that's what he framed it as. Jeff didn't want to see the love of his life with anyone else, he'd rather watch her die. Such a tragedy.

He did the job well, taken how it made him want to throw up every time he squeezed the gun in his cold hands.
He framed them all as suicides when he did them in the hospital grounds. Overdoses, hangings, some he even pushed off balconies. The highest ranked hospital in staff suicides.

Then there was the time everything went south;
Fear paid him to kill a nine year old patient from the closed ward. He had announced without emotion, without regret. Cold as a marble statue. Shane obivously wanted to know why, what in the word had this child done that would lead to this? Of course it was brushed off as 'not important'. And of course Shane declined, they were talking about a mentally ill child!
But one cannot simply quit as an assassin, he came to learn that quite painfully.

That night he packed his bags and took a taxi to the airport, he hadn't even said a word to Fear about leaving. He was smart like that. And Fear didn't know where he was from, or even what his real name was, he had just gone by as 'Legs' on the job.
But somehow someone knew.
A lingering taste of dread, something a little different from the one Shane got after a kill. More concrete, there was no bitter aftertaste of quit involved.
Just plain old fear, something he hadn't really felt since he was a child.

Three men in dark hoodies, how fucking cliché. He hadn't imagined to die that way, not ever.

He took a stab to the elbow that night, among about twenty kicks to the ribs before the cops pulled up and the dark figures fleed the scene.
He had a punctured lung, five fractured ribs and a concussion.
But he was alive.

That's the story behind the birth of Banjo McClintock-
The Grim Reaper of Chicago.
Death on two legs.